It is so much like attraction exercised by magic.

Archive for March, 2013

There have been times when I’ve suspected the objects around me of having revealed or perhaps taken up curious and unlooked for suggestions, pulling a host of strange significances and fascination from… well… that is the mystery, isn’t it?

As it is, I’m someone merely passing through, exercising at best a kind of temporary stewardship over all the little things I have come to view as my own. I catch myself looking at a particular book placed irregularly upon the shelf or regarding a clump of melted wax, my chess set whose chipped edge remains beautifully marred from accident or play and I am left with a feeling that I am surrounded by things possessing a sentience I would normally not suppose them to have and a life that may very well continue to exist in some vital way beyond the diverging tangent that is my own.

A sense of being observed is also intuited – such has been my experience anyway. A dialogue that might be called co-natural appears to develop between the observer and a world that looks back, regarding the artist in turn, with its own questions and requirements.

Whether this dialogue can be considered inspiration, I cannot say. I think it is more likely a way to inspiration rather than inspiration itself. Whatever the case it is always there and its promptings never fully abate until the impulse to do whatever is required of me is finally realised on canvas. Is it any wonder that we can’t look at a painting without thinking of it as somehow being “still life”?